Dremo

Inspiration

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in our current position as web developers, our clients
and colleagues often email us images or screenshots of their expectations or of our tasks. Keeping track
of these images is difficult, as Outlook has no built in search functionality to retrieve embedded images,
and we often need to resort to manually clicking through a number of emails to find the file we need.

Enter Dremo. Dremo provides the capability to quickly find the particular image or images you need at any given
moment, saving you from the click-through time and time again. Less time scouring = more time productive. Search down, productivity up.

What it does

Dremo was specifically designed as an Outlook 2016 command add-in. The add-in scans your Outlook inbox for all embedded images in your emails, and displays them accessibly within our
task pane. These images can then be saved, favorited, filtered, and sorted to make finding the right one a cinch. Each image can also open the associated email within Outlook. Images can also easily be saved to the cloud.
Your image data is never stored outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, we find 'em , resize 'em, and stream 'em directly to your screen.

How we built it

Step 1: Start with an idea

Step 2: Keep hacking away at it

Step 3: Repeat step 2 until it works

Challenges we ran into

Most online resources are specific to either the API, add-ins, or Azure but not for synchronizing all together into one app. There was a lot of trial and error with documentation across the board, until we painstakingly discovered solutions that worked for all-in-one.

Initial authentication was fairly straightforward when utilized via the web browser. However, in order to also enable authentication in Outlook, we then needed to rework sizeable functionality to follow the popup standard.

Keeping user preferences and settings synced between our database and the results of the 0365 API.

hasAttachment = false for messages that contain in-line images, yet these images are still being returned by the attachment endpoint, without a direct reference to the
containing message.

Browser compatibility issues. We found no documentation specifying the browser environments for add-ins within Outlook 2016, requiring us to
jump through multiple hoops to cover all possibilities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Response Time: We handle numerous large image files, but our load time is trivial.

Filtering: We've extended the Outlook search and filtering features to the next level.

Security: No hackable image data is ever stored on our servers.

Backend: As mostly frontend devs in our day jobs, we were enthusiastic about building a primarily server side JavaScript project, without another team demanding
callbacks of nested objects just because. --it was fun!